Work‐based learning as a field of study

Abstract

This article addresses the challenges that Garnett suggests face higher education through the lens of Bourdieu. In taking up the challenge set by Garnett for higher education in the knowledge economy and responding to its powerful and primary artefact – intellectual capital – the article reviews and uses the analytical tool of Bourdieu’s practice in the context of work‐based learning in higher education. The article suggests that the rivalry between the fields of higher education and employment weakens both in their attempt to appropriate values in a social field where intellectual capital is the main form of exchangeable capital.

[U]niversity professors are situated rather on the side of the subordinate pole of the field of power and are clearly opposed in this respect to the managers of industry and business. (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 36)

Notes

1. For a fuller discussion of this point as it related to business and education in the United States, see Ogawa and Kim (2005).

2. Rawolle (2005) addresses some of this issue in his insightful discussion of the mediatisation of knowledge economies.

3. Galland and Oberti (2000) remind us that the structures observed by Bourdieu are not now representative of French higher education where working‐class students now hold up to 25% of places. Furthermore, they argue that images of students as ‘idle dilettante does not seem to correspond to reality’ (Galland & Oberti, 2000, p. 110) as a direct rebuttal of Bourdieu (although Bourdieu does not actually assume this to be the case), it is only a manifestation of certain types of social capital that can ‘afford’ to behave like that. The working‐class higher education habitus is to work hard as symbolic gratitude.

4. Again, this is not uncontested, as Barnett and Coate (2005, p. 57; emphasis in original) state: ‘work cannot be offered as a universal category with which to structure curricula’.

5. Reading Gustavsen (2004) gives a fuller development of this idea.

6. Our notion of ‘conceptualisation of fields’ is borrowed from Rhynas’s (2005) development and application of it to the field of nursing.

7. Other than social work and nursing.